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Once I'd familiarised myself with the Arduino development kit I wanted to try and use it to monitor my electricity usage. I know you can buy commercial devices which do this but I wanted more than the current usage; I wanted to log usage over time and I wanted to involve Perl somehow. I saw the Flukso ages ago and even tried to buy one but they were out of stock.

Just got back from my first visit to the London Perl Workshop. Thanks East Coast Railways for not only cancelling my train to London (and making me sit on the train at York station for an hour for nothing) but also for cancelling the one back from London. I'm ashamed to be English when people travelled to the workshop from out of this country in less time than it took me to travel 200 miles by train.

I thoroughly enjoyed the whole weekend. It was great to put some faces to the people I've had contact with on the Internet (in particular ribasushi, timb, tux) and the talks were most enlightning. I have to pickout some highlights for me although I obviously did not see all the talks:

I've recently uploaded a new experimental (and development) release of DBD::ODBC 1.26_1 to CPAN. This contains over 200 block code changes so it is a VERY significant change and should not be used on production servers until you have tested it.
This release adds little in the way of functionality (and a few bug fixes) but is a major push to get DBD::ODBC truely ODBC 3.0 compliant and as such it will REQUIRE an ODBC driver manager to translate ODBC 3.0 calls to ODBC 2.0 if you are unlucky enough to have an ODBC 2.0 driver.
I include the changes below but a few notes in addition:

Firstly, I should say I don't use Windows that much these days. The Windows machines where I test DBI and DBD::ODBC I set up ages ago with a Perl built with MS Developer Studio and I tend to keep them for that purpose. However, I bought a whole load of nice shiny new parts to build myself a new PC a month ago and installed Ubuntu and Windows as I thought I could get a more up to date Perl on Windows at home.

I'm pleased to announce the 1.25 release of DBD::ODBC.
A full list of changes since the last major release is listed below and at DBD::ODBC Changes. New features include support for MS SQL Server's XML type, a new odbc_lob_read method, overriding of types on bind_col.
Many thanks to everyone who has reported issues and helped with the development and testing of DBD::ODBC and especially all my friends on #dbi, Perl Monks and my colleagues at Easysoft Limited..

Today someone posted a problem using the SQL Server XML datatype with DBI/DBD::ODBC on the dbi-users mailing list. I sorted their problem pretty quickly but noticed his code using length() on scalars which were bound with bound_col was not reporting the correct length. The example and output are below:

I am happy to announce another development release of DBD::ODBC. Many thanks to everyone who has contributed to this release and especially to all my friends on the #dbi irc channel and perl monks. My intention is to add a lob writing method and full support for DBI's DiscardString and StrictlyTyped attributes in the next development release before releasing a final development release and finally a 1.25 full release. To support the new odbc_lob_read I've had to delay the binding of columns until the first fetch instead of as before when the result-set was described. This should not have any adverse effects but you are advised to test this release as without any feedback it will move to the next final release. The changes since the last full release are:

I currently maintain DBD:ODBC and needed to obtain a lob (large object) in chunks. It doesn't really matter why but in general the lob is very large and I can process it in chunks in my Perl code so it makes sense to read it in chunks instead of read it all in one go (thus requiring loads of memory). DBD::ODBC does not have this functionality currently.

In the last few days on and off I've been trying to locate a problem with a fairly complicated Perl daemon using POE which was taking a huge amount of time to return a large file via LWP::UserAgent. It's taken a while since in reality we were not doing a simple HTTP GET and the circumstances under which the problem occurs are difficult to set up. However, I've at last tracked it down to taint mode.